Butterflies

Butterflies 12 – Aliens

Shaw woke sharply in the middle of the night. There were lights on everywhere. Unsual. She unmisted the walls. Her eye was drawn to the outer rim, lit up like a supernova.

'Oh my God!' she shook David. 'David! Get up!'

Atri stirred at her back. When he saw the light he catapulted awake and grabbed her.

'The ships are leaving!' she yelled.

'Get dressed,' Atri said. He pulled his robe on roughly.

Shaw was pulling on leggings, a shirt and coat when Atri went to fetch his Sphere. David followed her outside. Igogi ran to the public hoverpods, carrying children. They pods were like a river of lights all flowing in the same direction.

'They're evacuating,' David said.

'Yeah,' Shaw breathed in shock. 'Why?'

Then the whir of engines cut through the shouts and calls and Shaw spun. A ship hovered over the lawn, but it wasn't the Sphere. It was a fraction of the size of a Sprinter but a very similar shape. A glowing doorway appeared in the underside as it hovered, blasting the roses flat with the heat from its engines. Sinashi appeared in the doorway. He swung down from the bottom railing and grabbed his Mother in a tight hug.

'God, I thought you'd be dead. Get onboard now. It's an outbreak. Some kind of virus. Anzillu, they said. They'll come looking for survivors soon, and anything they find, they'll destroy.'

Then Atri came running up the path, the glowing Sphere only the size of a tennis ball, packed down into nearly no mass at all.

'Sinashi?' he frowned. He ran through the wind effortlessly.

'No time to explain. Get on board. My ship's faster than yours. I was supposed to take it round the block to run the new engines in. It's state of the art. But we're not coming back. Anatak is infected too.'

Shaw glanced back at the house they'd called home for fifteen years. She let Sinashi lift her into the cargo bay. David came after, then Atri pulled himself up, muscles bulging. Somewhere off in the darkness, the sound of chomping shook Shaw from her shock. Sinashi hit the button to close the airlocks and the ship sealed the door seamlessly with an odd, liquid metal.

By the time they'd all jogged up the corridor, Sinashi was already in the control chair. He slid his helmet on with one practised hand and laid his palms over the control streams.

'You sure you can fly this thing, lad?' Atri approached from behind.

'Don't be ridiculous,' Sinashi's voice came over the speakers. 'I can fly anything up a Galaxy Class no problem at all.'

'Go, lad!' Atri grinned, over the roar as the engines fired.

The ship jumped into space, leaving nothing but a scorch on the grass. It snapped through the membrane shield that protected the Observatory, setting off alarms and whipped into space. Inside the helmet, Sinashi dodged and zigzagged through a complex pattern of ships. Some were leaving Anatak with civilians, others were military ships coming the other way.

He evaded the Monster - the mothership from which the General relayed his orders, and turned the ship around.

'Time to see the other half of my family tree,' he murmured, not realising he could still be heard.

The ship lashed through the lightspeed barrier and disappeared into a yawning wormhole. Everything went quiet. Resistance slipped away. Sinashi watched the readouts like a hawk, intent on picking up anyone that might be following. Nobody did. Eventually, when he was certain they'd escaped, he engaged the autopilot and hopped down.

'I'm done with the fucking army,' he announced, taking off his helmet. He dug fingers into the hem of his sleeve. It peeled back intelligently to reveal needle marks in his arms. He showed them to his family. His eyes burned furiously. 'This is what they did to me, when I refused to kill a man for no reason. I'm too gentle, they said. Too human. Well they can shove it up their arse. I'm a free man now. I'll never go back.'

'Jesus, Sinashi,' Shaw whispered.

'If they catch us, I'm dead,' he went on. 'Desertion is punishable by death. So they can't catch us. We're going somewhere that they won't look. With a stop over on Earth, to warn them. I hope they're ready for first contact.'

A black nose protruded from one of the open doors and in came Onyx, walking unsteadily on the unfamiliar surface.

'Hells,' Sinashi went to grab his beak. 'He was locked in. I think he's figured out how to open the gate.'

Shaw turned to David.

'If we're going to arrive on Earth with all this information...in an alien ship...we'd better figure out what we're going to say.'

'I think...We come in peace,' David smiled.

Shaw just smirked.

'Yeah. That ought to do it. We're going home, David. Bloody hell.'

David nodded.

'Yes. It seems we are.'

000

Deep in the cargo hold, the aerobatics had dislodged a single silver vessel. It lay open on the metal grid floor, it's internal glass baubles shattered. A greenish black goo leaked out, binding to the bacterial lifeforms that had been living onboard since it's last time in dock. Somebody had simply forgotten to clean the floors. Over the next few hours, the heat from the engines incubated it. It began to breed. It began to crawl. It learned how to walk. It found the air vents and learned to climb. It smelled the telltale scent of life, and moved towards its future, sniffing, hunting. Hungry.

END.

A/N - Well, there we go. This story really didn't go as planned. It was one hell of a challenge to write.

For the curious, the style was inspired by the original Prometheus Screenplay. I read it shortly after seeing the movie and I was curious to see what would happen to my writing style if I mixed a bit of that in. I quite like the effect. It leaves a lot to the imagination and it gave my creativity a bit of a workout trying to decide what to describe, and what to leave to the reader.

I actually wrote far more material than you see here. Much of it was initial drafts and some practise runs to get the characters solid and then there were scenes that I felt just didn't gel or flow with the story that I cut out for artistic reasons that were otherwise decent enough.

It's meant to be the second of three stories, but whether I'll ever find the time to expand on it is another matter. Perhaps the imagination can be left to fill in the gaps?

I wanted to write a lot more Xisuthros because he was SO much fun. More politics too, especially around the Igogi's reasons for keeping Shaw in stasis so long but other projects call ;)